Holy Motors (2012)

Holy Motors Synopsis

Over the course of a single day, Monsieur Oscar travels by limousine around
Paris to a series of nine "appointments," transforming into new characters or
incarnations at each stop. Fetched in the morning by Céline, his trusty chauffeur
on this surreal journey, Oscar begins the day as a captain of industry. Then he
becomes a gypsy crone, begging for spare change on a bridge over the Seine.
Inside a digital production facility, heʼs a ninja warrior transformed by cuttingedge
technology into a reptilian sex god. Next heʼs a gibberish-spewing
troglodyte who kidnaps a fashion model from a photo shoot in Père-Lachaise
cemetery, ferrying her to his underground lair in the sewers. Then heʼs the
melancholy father of a teenage daughter, followed by a shadowy assassin sent to
kill his own doppelgänger, a dying old man, and finally a thwarted lover revisiting
a flame from his past atop a decaying Right Bank department store next to the
Pont-Neuf. Monster movie, film noir, romantic drama, musical, crime thriller,
futuristic sex fantasia... Holy Motors is all of these and, then again, none of
these. It is a ravishing, shape-shifting, fever dream of becoming, unraveling and
starting all over again. From celluloid magic to the digital data stream, Monsieur
Oscarʼs epic journey of the soul is all of our dreams.

January is the time of year when everyone from diehard cinephiles to movie critics look back on the previous year’s film offerings and assign them a numeric value. This is what the “Best Of” lists are all about, and it’s not the most enjoyable process. If you think otherwise, at least check out this one particular movie ranking, which professes to rank the top films of not the year but of the past decade. We guarantee it’ll light a fire under your butt.

2012 was a really, really hard year to sum up in list form, and a top 20 would really be more appropriate to reflect the astonishing variety of blockbusters, out-of-nowhere successes and totally tiny arthouse stuff that grabbed me this year. A lot of these movies snuck up on me, only revealing their brilliance long after I'd written a review or thought I'd forgotten about it. Plenty of those not on this list did the opposite, making an amazing first impression and fading so quickly

“It’s so weird,” the photographer exclaims, looking at abnormal Parisian Oscar (Denis Lavant). That could summarize Carax’s film in a nutshell. Lavant reportedly plays numerous characters in the film. And yet, despite a stream of critical raves and a slew of mesmerizingly gorgeous visuals, the trailer doesn’t say a whole heck of a lot about the finished product.

This week on Operation Kino, we've got our makeup mirror and our limo driver ready, as we review the experimental, very beloved new French film Holy Motors. From there we use one of the week's other new releases, Alex Cross, to talk about the phenomenon of movies that are so bad they're good, and whether that's actually a legitimate way to enjoy a film